Great Run Today

Here I am half asleep before I even had any coffee

Woke up at 5AM on the dot before the coffee pot went off, and didn't even bother to put clothes on--instead I donned my running clothes while waiting for coffee to finish, fixed breakfast (hard boiled egg on English muffin with some jam), organized a little bit, visited the bathroom, loaded up my gym bag with a can of Coke and bottle of Gatorade, and headed to the Y.

I was on the treadmill running at 6:02AM, and for the first :30 of the run, I almost wasn't fully awake, but my legs felt fine, since I was running in Z1, although I had to fend off a strong desire to puke since I had eaten so close to starting. The workout for today was this:

1:50 as 30' z1, 20' z2, 10' z4, 5' z2, 10' z4, 5' z2, 15' z3, 15' z2

The Z1 and Z2 stuff felt, indeed easy, and even the Z3. I like doing the Z4 stuff on the track, but today I kept it all to the treadmill so I wouldn't run too hard. Since I only took about a 30 second break after the first 1:05, because I wanted to just slide through the Z4 stuff, I was finished about 7:53AM. I had some chatting company for my last :30 in the name of my pilot friend, Chris.

The can of Coke lasted me for about 1:10--usually I'm done with it in under an hour, but my breakfast kept trying to come up on me so I was taking smaller sips. I can only handle Coke (fully fizzed!) to start when I run this early, as it seems to keep my stomach settled. Once I transition to outdoor long runs, I'll need to carry defizzed Coke so it doesn't escape the bottle while I'm bouncing around. It sucks, because I really prefer it fizzy. Oh well!

When I got off the treadmill, I realized that if I had planned better, I could have jumped in the pool for :30, which would have been a nice cool down, but I didn't have swim gear, so I decided to stay and stretch for a little bit, and still felt good, so I headed downstairs and knocked out 20 chinups, 75 pushups and 150 crunches in about 10'. I was originally going to skip that stuff today, but what the hell, I had some time, so I got it done.

I will do one more workout today which is to finish up my strength stuff , which should take about :35. That will set me up for only 2 workouts tomorrow--a 3300-yard swim and a :50 easy run.

One of the things I did this morning between getting up and arriving at the Y was to look at my long run progression to see when my first 2 hour run would be. I had things configured so that it wouldn't be for another 5 weeks, and I thought, what the fucking hell, I'm ready for it NOW! So I retooled things and will hold at 1:50 next week but then start in on the 2 hour runs in 2 weeks! Yee-haw! Unfortunately, it will still be darkness when I need to start them in order to get them done before work for the next 3-4 weeks, which means still on the treadmill, but that's OK--it will make the transition to outdoor long runs at my favorite place, Waterfall Glen, that much sweeter!

I am still processing huge amounts of stress and sadness for myself and one of my close friends, and you put that together with some pretty heavy duty training, and you can bet I'm a bit of a psychological mess, but I'm mostly holding it together. I'm starting to let my house cleanliness slide, but it was only a matter of time before the MESS showed up. I am rotating 3 pairs of running shoes and doing indoor and outdoor runs, so that means sunglasses, hats, tights, everything is getting used, and soon enough there will be bike and helmet and bike shoe rotations (although Bitch doesn't need to come out for about a month), and OMG the amount of bottles I am going through now is getting to be pretty spectacular.

Well now that I've got all this out of my system and I'm at work digging on that version of stress, I think I may need a little nappie-poo later or at least a lay down.

Running--from Craptastic to Cracktastic!

I've been struggling getting my running legs back. It's to be expected, though--even though I was slow as molasses at IMLP, I still did a marathon, and oh, yeah an Ironman.

Up until today, my legs have pretty much felt like bricks whenever I've run. I am not a runner. Running has never come naturally to me, although I've had some really good runs. But I still don't consider myself a runner. I just get it done when I need to. I'd rather ride a bike!

I have pushed myself through some really bad runs in the last 2 weeks. "Really bad" meaning my legs hurt like hell. I do realize that a marathon causes all sorts of muscular damage (I did 3 of them in 2007--Disney and then those 2 Ironmans), and I know it would be better if I had access to a trail nearby to lessen the impact, but I don't, so run on roads I must most of the time.

Tuesday I was not supposed to run off the bike, but that is just a hassle (extra showers and the eating thing), so I went ahead and ran off the bike. I wasn't able to ride very hard (I guess I blew my wad, as they say, on Sunday riding like hell into the wind), so I shouldn't feel too bad running. I didn't feel all that bad, but since no matter which way I go from my house I'm running hills, well, it's one thing to recover from a marathon, another to be able to run on flats, and another thing entirely to be able to cope with hills. I didn't do as poorly as I thought I would, though. The workout was made harder by the fact that on Monday I went back to my normal level of weights, including legs, so I knew I was asking for it on Tuesday to think I could ride with power and then run off the bike! But I did it anyway, and I'm never sorry for pushing myself through stuff like that, because it has to be done if I'm going to regain my strength.

Yesterday I swam leisurely in the morning (2800 meters is all), and went for a run in the middle of the day. I did not drink any Coke (besides who knows how many calories are in a can anyway?) before I left, but in retrospect maybe could have used some. I decided to run west instead of my usual east (thinking the winds were out of the west, but I was wrong--they were out of the north), and the first mile is mostly uphill, and then more uphill and then more uphill, and my legs felt like rocks. But I was laughing and smiling about it because I'm doing it to myself! When I was almost done, I took a different way home (the last about .3 miles), which normally would be downhill, but it was uphill! Sometimes I swear everywhere I run is uphill, but I am used to it, which is why when I'm recovering from something major, it sucks because I pretty much have to run hills. All good, though!

I felt pretty wasted after running yesterday, but I really wanted to finish up my core routine (which includes some leg work) so I didn't have to do it today. I knew it would only take about 15 minutes, but I kept putting it off until finally I decided, fuck it, it's go time. All I was doing was watching mindless TV anyway (waiting for the Olympics to be on), so I may as well get it done. My legs protested mightily, and I wondered while doing it whether I was digging myself into a hole. I stretched really well afterwards, ate some more spaghetti and meatballs, decided I needed to get a good night's sleep, and was fast asleep at 8:30. I mean I passed out in like 5 seconds after my head hit the pillow!

When I woke up this morning, I could tell as soon as I got out of bed that I felt really great! My legs felt the best they've felt in weeks--going downstairs I felt nice and loose. I filled my 2 12-oz. bottles with partially defizzed Coke (I opened the cans yesterday and left them in the fridge, and one day in a can is not professional defizzing), put them in the cooler, ate a Powerbar and had some coffee, and I was off to Waterfall Glen for a 2-hour run. It was a very cool morning (high 50's) so no swimsuit today.

As I started to run (at 6:15), I knew I wasn't going very fast, but I felt comfortable, and I didn't want to jinx myself, but I thought this might be a good run. About 1.5 miles in, I saw 6 bucks all just hanging out browsing! They just looked at me and went back to their early morning snack. I didn't want any Coke until about 2 miles in (I had woken up at 5:00). As soon as I took a sip, it worked its magic (probably more the sugar than anything), and I continued to feel great. I think I was about 3.5 miles in when I decided I would go out for :45 and back, but as I wasn't feeling like I needed much liquids, I decided to just keep going around the full loop (about 9.7 miles) and then add on.

During Mile 8, I thought about when was the last time I ran the entire loop? It was back in April during one of my half NothingMan's, and I remembered how great I felt that day, and I know I was smiling a lot today, too. When I finished the loop, my watch told me that this was probably the second fastest time I've had going around.

I grabbed my other 12-oz. bottle of Coke from my car and headed out for another 1/2 hour or so. The fog had burned off, but it was still very humid. I chucked my singlet back at my car, as it was soaked through and through. That last bit of running seemed to go by pretty fast, and it made me look forward to next week's long run which will be 2:15.

When I got back to my car, I saw a cyclist that I had seen while running and have seen several other times I've run there. He asked me (after seeing the sticker on my car) if I'm really a "Triathlon Freak." Answer: YES! I told him how happy I was to have a good run today after last week's death march. He told me he's done one Ironman, Great Floridian, and how during the marathon it was like an out of body experience, like he was floating even though he knew he was in pain and...well you can guess the rest. About all I could say is that this is why I do this. Only it took me 4 Ironman's to get to that point! We exchanged information, and I hope he comes out and joins us for part of NothingMan. He got that concept--how you strip away everything except just the DOING of the sports.

I don't know how the next few weeks of training will go, but today was perfect! Tomorrow I'm going to swim 3 miles total (2.5 straight) and see how that feels. I'll probably end up riding 100 miles on Sunday all by my lonesome, but that's OK...last Sunday was pretty much that way, too. And then I get to enjoy a bike race afterwards!

Right now I feel "appropriately tired" from my run, and am getting a massage tonight, so I should be good to go tomorrow. I am almost feeling as strong as I wanted to feel about 4 weeks ago, and now I am really looking forward to NothingMan! I know there will be other runs coming up where I'll struggle, but that's OK. It's in the pushing through when you feel like crap that you really learn what your body can do, and I'm amazed that I'm able to do this at all most days.

Life is good!

The Truth About Tapering, Part IV

I had a nice swim yesterday--just got in and swam 2200 meters straight (close enough to 1/2 IM distance, right?) with the pull buoy. I could tell I've really been giving it to my arms lately. As usual, I swam in the gutter lane, where the jets of incoming water are shooting in at a pretty high speed. They toss me around a bit, so I know I'm not swimming as fast as I might be able to, but that's OK. The water was nice and cool.

When I finished, I had to tell myself that I was done and didn't need to do more. On such a lovely day, I can imagine just hanging out at the pool for an entire day. Someday I need to do that--swim like 2,000, lay around, swim another 1,000, lay around--you get the idea. I did manage to stretch for a few minutes in the pool.

Riding home, as always, felt harder than the ride there, even though I hadn't used my legs to swim at all. When I got home, I finished up the bike bottle of Gatorade and poured myself my post-swim cup of coffee. I also noticed I was very hungry, meaning my evil plan to deprive myself of carbs was working. So I ate a 1/2 pint or whatever size it is of raspberries and 1/2 pint of blueberries, and within an hour I was still starving so I made myself an egg salad sandwich. This, mind you, is all before 9:30AM!

I did a bunch of work and something came up that put me on delay for my brick workout. In the meantime, I was feeling plenty tired and decided I needed to violate my no mid-day caffeine taper policy, so I drank a can of Coke and ate one of those Gu Roctane things. The Gu tasted pretty good (blueberry pomegranate flavor), but I didn't notice anything special about how it felt. I also know now that I will want Ultra Violence in my Fuel Belt for the IMLP marathon and not Coke, although I'm going to start defizzing a liter of each tonight (professional defizzing, you know!).

And then I saw clouds rolling in, checked the radar, and WTF it looked like it was going to rain! Usually a threat of rain gets me to giddy up, but even though I put on the aero helmet and was pretty much naked on Ultra Bitch, I decided it best to hold down the intensity yesterday. With the extra pool riding I've been doing plus the extra yards because I'm doing meters (trust me, in my case it adds up!), I realized I'm doing a bit more than I need to be doing and need to get my legs rested. So in addition to riding easy, I also cut the ride short by about :15. When I got home, I got ready to run, and my legs still felt iffy, so I decided I didn't need to run for :30, but anyway the clouds were really building, so I just started running around the block (my block is pretty big), and adding on all while watching the clouds. Of course, it was impossible to avoid hills, so I turned onto one of the steepest closest to home, I'm running up it mumbling, "Fuck, fuck, fuck," but it's OK.

I managed an even :15 of running, and just as I approached my house, it started sprinkling, and my neighbor directly across the street had just arrived back in his car, and he says to me, "You made it just in time, kiddo!" You know that just made me smile hugely, because I'm thinking here I'm 51 and someone is calling me kiddo! Anyway, literally as soon as I got in my house the sky opened up, and I was happy for it, because we needed the rain. Later on I got a haircut, and when I got home, I decided a salad was not going to cut it for dinner, so I did have some rice. Part of my heavy leg feeling is the carb deprivation so we'll see if I feel more normal today.

So when I add up yesterday it was still 2.6 hours of "work," and through Thursday, I'm up to 9.5 hours of training (lots of swimming). Today I'm going to swim 1/2 hour to 45 minutes, depending (I hope it quits raining), but I am not riding a bike to the pool. Later on I'm running 1:15 and that will be that for today, a good stretch, hopefully I'll see my friend Lila passing out painkiller (booze) after work, and then I'll really start my preparations for next week. My new Fuel Belt arrived yesterday (yeah), so I need to play around with that plus race belt plus streamers. The forecast calls for rain tomorrow, so maybe I won't do that 2-mile open water race, who knows? At this point it doesn't matter, but I'm sort of looking forward to that sprint on Sunday!